Unsafe dating applications lead to harassment across Capital

NEW DELHI: Hosted primarily by foreign countries, mobile dating applications being used in India do not offer a lot of security features are becoming unsafe and are being used for crime.

The Delhi Police claimed that the cases in which these applications are used took time to get solved as the details regarding the crime are difficult to get. According to the police, there are not enough security features in the applications and anyone can post personal details of any person available on other social media websites which can lead to harassment.

In a recent case, a 15-year- old boy had put the personal details of his classmate in the application in Shahdara district. The girl started getting inappropriate calls from unknown people. The Cyber Cell of Shahdara district has solved the case.

Cyber Cell investigators told Millennium Post that during the investigation they found that the application was basically from another country.

“When we visited the domain registrar office, they were not giving the details as the domain was in another country and they told us they will not reveal the data,” said the investigator. He added that the case might have been solved in a few days but it took almost a month to solve it as it took a long time to gather the details.

“The law applicable in India might not be in other countries, the domain registrar told us. They were not ready to reveal the data as the domain was not hosted in India,” he added.

Another major problem is that these applications also accept wrong details. The Internet Protocol address used by the dating application user is dynamic which means more than 1,000 people are using the same IP address and to reach the main accused all the phone numbers have to be analysed.

“The IP can be from Delhi or other states,” he said.

DCP (Shahdara) Nupur Prasad said that there is no verification in the application and due to the domain hosted outside the country, the details regarding the crime take some time to gather.

Police claimed that the cases in which these applications are used took time to get solved as the details regarding the crime are difficult to get